Electronic devices, such as personal computers and mobile terminals, increasingly provide a variety of communications, multimedia, and/or data processing capabilities. For example, mobile terminals, such as cellphones, personal digital assistants, and/or laptop computers, may provide storage and access to data in a wide variety of multimedia formats, including text, pictures, music, and/or video.
Storage capacity in electronic devices may increase exponentially in the next several years. For example, it is believed that storage capacity may double at a higher rate than processor speed and/or transmission bandwidth. As such, electronic devices and may store gigabytes and even terabytes of data in the near future.
Due to the increasing storage capacity provided by electronic devices, search functionality may become increasingly important in managing larger amounts of data. In conventional electronic devices, users may search for data by entering a string of alphanumeric characters in a search field, and/or by navigating to the location or ‘folder’ in which the data is stored via a menu system. For example, mobile terminals, such as mobile phones, may offer a search field within particular applications (for instance, searching for particular messages within a messaging application, searching for particular names within a contacts application, etc.). In addition, Zi Corporation's Qix™ is a search and discovery engine for mobile phones that provides a search interface from the standby screen of a mobile phone. Also, personal computers may offer both search and navigation functions to aid users in finding desired data stored in memory devices associated with the computer.